Warwick Hadfield on 'the sledge'

Sports reporter for ABC Radio National's weekday Breakfast, Warwick Hadfield addresses 'the sledge'. It's a very vernacular language form, used by competitive men on the sports field to gain an advantage over their opponents by messing with their confidence and their concentration.

Transcript

Warwick Hadfield: There is a delicious link between the origins of the term, 'sledging', back in the sixties, and the most recent incident which has thrust the word back into prominence.

According to Ian Chappell, the former Australian test captain and a bloke who in his time did a fair bit of sledging, the term for insulting an opponent to get him or her to break their concentration is named after the singer Percy Sledge.

Back in those more genteel times, off the field at least, a bloke who swore in front of a woman was dubbed a Percy, or a Sledge. These days they are called comedians.

But I digress. Percy Sledge's one and only hit was 'When a Man Loves a Woman'. When a man loves a woman, or indeed a young girl, as was the case with Des Headland, the Fremantle footballer, he will do many things: not swear in front of her, not break wind – or he might put a huge tattoo of her image on his arm.

Perhaps because he's more into Wasp or Metallica than soulful ballads, this depth of affection was apparently beyond the grasp of the young West Coast Eagles player Adam Selwood.

He proceeded to insult the woman depicted in the tattoo, even if he didn't use the words of which he was later formally accused, blah, blah, blah.

Given all that has followed, Selwood might not immediately agree, but he is perhaps fortunate he chose Des Headland's daughter as his target.

I'd hate to think what might have been the result if he had made the mindless remark to the Geelong player Paul Chapman.

Chappie has on his back a large tattoo of the face of his brother, who was killed in a work accident. The Chapman family was deeply affected by the loss, and the tattoo was part of a grieving process which has allowed Paul to not only come to terms with the his brother's death, but to continue his career in football.

So far you are probably thinking I am against sledging.

In the instances above, I most assuredly am. Nobody should have their loved ones demeaned in the name of winning.

But at the same time, when the pendulum drifts from crass insult to a bit of banter out on the field, sometimes to gain the psychological edge, sometimes for a giggle, sometimes both, it is not just acceptable, but worthy of its own myths and legends.

Imagine, if you will, Shane Keith Warne, the greatest leg-spinner in the history of the game, at the top of his mark; flicking the ball in one hand while running the fingers of his other hand through his artificially re-created locks.

At the other end of the pitch, marking out centre with a few swift drags of his sprigs, is a South African batsman who in a previous series Warne has reduced to a tragi-comic figure.

Says Warnie: 'I've been waiting four years for another chance to bowl at you.'

The South African batsman's mind obviously operates faster than his feet because he replies swiftly, 'Looks like you spent it eating.'

All good fun, a bit of banter, chewing the fat, even.

But little wonder Warnie felt the need for a few of his mum's slimming tablets.

Mervyn Hughes never felt the need to slim down, running in from somewhere adjacent to next week throughout his 200 wicket test cricket career, bluffing and blustering away in expletives all the time.

In one match, the Pakistani irritation under a batting helmet Javed Miandad decided he'd had enough of Merv's behaviour.

'Merv Hughes, you are nothing but a fat bus conductor,' said Javed.

A few balls later, yes it had to happen, Hughes dismissed Javed. The bowler ran straight to the batsman, nostrils flaring, every bristle of his moustache fully erect and his chest puffed out nearly as far as his stomach, demanding: 'Tickets please, tickets please.'

The weight of an opponent is emerging as a bit of a focal point here, isn't it?

A Zimbabwean batsman was once asked by an Australian bowler why he was so fat.

'Because every time I make love to your wife she gives me a biscuit,' was the rapier-like reply.

You can probably just get away with that one, but bringing spouses, partners or children into the banter is fraught, as the West Indian Ramnaresh Sarwan found out almost as awkwardly as did Adam Selwood.

Sarwan was known to be particularly close to the West Indian captain, Brian Lara. As he came in to bat in a test match in the West Indies, Glenn McGrath, the Australian fast bowler inquired politely, as fast bowlers tend to do: 'What does Brian Lara's cock taste like?'

'Don't ask me, ask your wife,' said Sarwan.

McGrath exploded into one of the more unseemly confrontations ever seen on a cricket field, screaming that if Sarwan ever brought his wife into it again, he would end up extremely unwell.

In the Australian environment where, of course, none of our swimmers could possibly be on steroids and none of our cricketers could ever be involved in match-fixing, etc, etc, we were supposed to feel well disposed towards McGrath because his wife Jane was at that time fighting breast cancer.

Not really, if he hadn't made the first comment, there would not have been the second one.

It was about this time that the Australian Cricket Board realised bantering, chewing the fat, sledging – had crossed into a territory where it was impacting on the good image of the game and thus its ability to attract future generations.

A young cricketer in Sydney was overjoyed when he discovered that his debut in first grade coincided with one of those rare occasions when the deity like members of the test team would be available for club cricket.

He would be playing against his absolute hero, the man he had looked up to for years and whom he one day hoped to emulate by pulling on the baggy green cap.

At the end of the day, he had been subjected to so much side-of-the-mouth psychology by his hero that he went home and tore his poster down from the bedroom wall.

The Australian players now have a code of behaviour called the Spirit of Cricket, in which they promise to desist from the more tawdry aspects of sledging.

Of course, that didn't stop Shane Warne playing the most merciless of mind games with the English cricketers during the recent Ashes test.

The microphone in the stump caught Warne wondering out very loudly whether Paul Collingwood deserved his MBE for being a very small part of England's Ashes series win the year before.

And the stump microphone may or may not have revealed that sledging is not always aimed at your opponents.

It might have been Warnie, or it might have been Joe the cameraman, who said of a young Queenslander making his test debut: 'Can't bat, can't bowl, can't field!'

Off course, sledging a team-mate is not a modern phenomenon.

The atmosphere in the Australian dressing rooms in the 1970s ... yes when Ian Percy Sledge Chappell was captain ... was so combative that one young bloke kept getting migraines.

He got little sympathy. Ian Chappell's view was that if you weren't tough enough to be in the Australian dressing room, well you wouldn't be tough enough for test cricket.

The point is well made. In sport, as in life, the strength of the muscle between the ears is the one that ultimately splits potential from achievement.

Because of the nature of the game, with a fair bit of down time for idle chatter as bowlers amble back to their run-ups, cricket is ideal for sledging, which probably explains why the term has its derivations in that sport and why most of the examples above come from the summer game.

There's another lovely story worth telling just because it's so good.

A batsman had played and missed a few times, causing the bowler to declare: 'It's red, got gold lettering and white stitching on it and weighs about five and a half ounces!'

The batsman not only hit the next ball for six, but right out of the ground, adding for good measure: 'Well you know what it looks like, so you go and find it!'

At times, Australian football also creates plenty of opportunities for the odd 'More tea, Vicar' type of exchange.

Defenders spend most of the afternoon attempting to adhere themselves to the hips of opposing forwards.

At that level of intimacy, whispering, even shouting in the shell-like, is hardly difficult.

The Geelong fullback Matthew Scarlett, running up to take his place alongside the generously proportioned West Coast Eagle (yep, chewing the fat again) Scott Cummings, said very loudly: 'Have you swallowed a sheep, Cummings?'

In the rugby codes, what goes on in scrums, in Rugby Union scrums particularly, defines a man more than anything in his life.

However, rampant halitosis, an opponent's fingers trying to reverse your eye-ball into the back of your skull, all while concentrating on the biomechanics so hard it hurts the brain stems most props are credited with, probably make coming up with something clever to say just a tad problematic.

So sledging is more often confined to off-field mind games, particularly in the build-up to important matches, but of course, when you lead with your chin in the highly public world of sport, you need to be a very good player.

Enter Richie Williams, the young St George five-eighth.

As the Saints prepared to play Eastern Suburbs, he opined that his direct opponent, the Roosters five-eighth Braith Anasta, was past his best.

Saints lost the game, Anasta outplayed Williams and couldn't find a broadcast rights holder's microphone fast enough to suggest that Williams keep his big trap shut in future and that next week he would be playing in reserve grade where he belonged.

Come next week, young Braith was re-christened Anastadamus by a clever sub-editor because Richie was back in reserve grade.

Coaches absolutely hate it when one of their players says something that fires up their opponents.

So if you sledge – and believe me, they all do and will always do, and not just at the elite level – it's got to have the desired outcome; mental disintegration causing your opponent to lose concentration rather than re-focusing it.

Nor, in the modern milieu, should it be of such a tasteless quality that it will bring the game into disrepute.

Which brings us back to Adam Selwood – though even his words couldn't have done more to bring the game into disrepute than did the tribunal hearing that followed.

Selwood, who, according to the agitprop from his club and from anyone who knows his family (from which three AFL footballers have already come), is a terrific young bloke.

He denied saying the stuff about Headland's daughter, but not the insulting remarks about the tattoo generally.

The AFL Tribunal found him not guilty of offensive and insulting language.

Then, the tribunal cleared Headland of his actions when he responded to Selwood's words, on the basis that he was provoked.

Houdini, 10 metres under water and wrapped in chains and padlocks, would have been impressed by that one.

The only good to have come out of this is that sledging has spent a considerable amount of time under the forensic microscope of the media, the opinion-makers and the officials.

The AFL has been forced to remind its young men that certain attitudes to women are just not acceptable.

When a man loves a woman, any man, any woman, you won't insult her, or him.

You would like to think that there was a profound moral imperative behind this as much as a desire to keep on-side around 50 per cent of the marketplace.

But will sporting authorities take the next step, as commercial imperatives and political correctness collide in ways that make previous generations spin in their coffin more than a Shane Warne delivery?

Will we be stopped from commenting on someone with a bit more to cuddle than most, or a bit less hair, or an ability to miss as often as they hit?

My great friend and captain Phil Morgan loves to say, whenever a batsman has a huge swing and misses: 'He's obviously got a wedding to get to!'

And everyone smiles ... including the batsman.

Do women sledge? Well they never did when I played in the mixed doubles in a time not far removed from the 1960s.

And if memory serves me well, they didn't swear in front of blokes back then.

Maybe if they did, the term would be a Patsy, or a Clyne, as in 'Stand by your Man'.

Whatever, within reason, I don't mind a bit of banter with my sport. In fact it would be exceptionally tedious without it.

One thing though will raise my ire. Having come up with our own term for it, brilliantly conceived by Ian Chappell and his colleagues, I would hate to see the word sledging replaced ... like so many of our other home-grown terms ... by the American name for it, 'trash talk'.

We put out the garbage in this country – and when we banter on the sports field, seeking either a laugh, a psychological advantage, or when it really works, both – we sledge.